Marty's/Main Book Room SaleIn our Main Room, prices are way below what used book stores charge. Paperbacks are 50 cents and up, and
hardcovers are $1 and up. Numbered tickets for the Main Room are given out
beginning at 8 am on Saturday. These reserve your place in the line that
forms before the 11 am opening. You may pick up a ticket for yourself and
for one other person.

Children's Books in K6
Room K6 in the K wing (see
map) is
entirely filled with children's books and toys. You'll find picture books,
school age fiction, award winners, non-English titles, and books for parents and
teachers, many for under $1. This room and the Bargain Room open at 10 am
on Saturday.

Bargain Books in K7
Next door in K7 is the Bargain Room, where paperbacks
are 50 cents, hardcovers are $1, and children's books are just 25 cents each.
The room also contains many LP records and 78s at $1 each. On Sunday, the
room opens at 11 am and all prices are half off. Save even more on Sundays by buying grocery bags
from us for $5 each and stuffing them with any items in the room.

A reminder: members of the Friends of the Palo Alto Library get in early once a
year. This year, it will be at our December 13 sale. Regular members
get into the Main Room one hour early and life members are admitted two hours
early. More information.

Non-Profit Book Giveaway

Non-profit organizations and schools that need free books should come to the
Bargain Room this month from 4 to 6 pm on Sunday, October 12.
Please bring grocery bags to put books into.
More information.

Suggestions?

We're always eager to hear your suggestions for ways to
improve our book sale. Please email them to us at suggestions@friendspaloaltolib.org
or mention them to a volunteer at the sale.

New Booksale Hours and Rules

Starting this month, the Bargain Room will open at 11 am on Sundays. That gives you two extra hours when all prices in the room are half-off, or to save even more by stuffing grocery bags full of books, videos, records, and games for $5 a bag. Our two other rooms will still open at 1 pm on Sunday and all rooms close at 4 pm.

With these extra Sunday hours for the Bargain Room, there will no longer be 50% discounts on Saturday afternoons.

Our new outdoor sale of $1 books begins at 9 am on
Saturday, two hours before the adjacent Main Room itself opens. The outdoor sale
will will be open
until 4 pm and again from 1 to 4 pm on Sunday.

One other change: to make shopping fairer for all our customers, please buy just 12 items at a time in the Children's Room during its first hour on Saturday (from 10 am to 11 am ). Our cashiers are happy to help you store your purchases outside if you wish to buy more.

Marty Paddock, Recent Friends Booksale Manager, Passes Away

It
is with sadness that we extend our sympathies to the relatives and friends
of Marty Paddock, manager of the Friends of the Palo Alto Library booksale
from 2000 to 2006, who passed away on October 1, 2008 at home with her
family. Under her
leadership, our booksales more than doubled to well over $200,000 a year and the
entire operation moved from Terman into our present location
in the Cubberley Community Center. With tremendous energy
and enthusiasm, Marty managed to make each month's sale a success no matter what obstacles
appeared. Her presence will be greatly missed by all of our customers,
volunteers, donors, and members.

In Marty's honor, we now call the Main Room at Cubberley "Marty's Room."
There are also brass plaques commemorating her service for Palo Alto's
library community on benches and patio
chairs at Palo Alto's Main Library. A
memorial service for Marty will be held in the coming weeks; please see our
web site for more information
when that becomes available.

Preview Our Shelves

Check
out some of the tens of thousands of books that will be on sale this weekend
using our shelf preview
pictures.

October 23 Annual Meeting of the Friends

Come to our annual meeting later this month to hear Dr. Jonathan Herzog of the Stanford History Department and the
Hoover Institute discuss "Red State, Blue State: The Mysterious
Twentieth-Century Shift in America's Political Map." Herzog recently wrote The
Hammer and the Cross, a book examining how and why American leaders employed
religion as a weapon in the early Cold War. He is also the son of a
library director.

We'll be holding our own elections at the meeting as well.
Our Nominating Committee's slate for 2009 officers is Betsy Allyn (President),
Martha Schmidt (Vice President), Margarita Quihuis (Secretary), and Enid Pearson
(Treasurer). Half of the Friend's board is elected each year and the
committee has nominated Gretchen Emmons, Gerry Masteller, Enid Pearson, Jim Schmidt, Steve Staiger, Ellen Wyman,
and Scottie Zimmerrnan for the
board seats with 2009-2010 terms.

The meeting will begin on
Thursday, October 23 at 7:30
pm at the Palo
Alto Art Center Auditorium at 1313 Newell Ave.
Refreshments will be served and the event is free and open to all.

Progress on Audit Recommendations

Library Director Diane Jennings reported to the City Council on Monday, October 5
as to the status of 32 recommendations to improve the library made last year by the City
Auditor. 18 of the recommendations have been completed,
resulting in a unified scheduling
and tracking system for employees, 68 magazine subscriptions that will not
be renewed due to low usage, fingerprinting of all adult volunteers, better
cash handling, and resumption of sending collection letters, among others.
Based on the auditor's recommendations to establish performance targets, the library sought to
increase volunteer hours 10% in 2007-08 over the prior year but achieved 2%.
However, the library exceeded its goals of increasing Operation Homebound recipients and
volunteers by 20% and now delivers materials to the Palo Alto Nursing Center
and the Palo Alto Commons as well.

Jennings pointed out that by
January 2009, patrons will be able to pay overdue fines by credit card
online, as the auditor urged. The city's budget staff, however, turned
down for 2008-09 the recommendation to begin weekend transfers of materials
between branches, which would expedite filling patron holds.

Surveys of Palo Altans have shown interest in longer library hours. During the temporary closure of the
College Terrace branch beginning in 2009, Jennings noted that freed-up staff
may be able to lengthen the Mitchell Park Library's hours to match those at
Main. In addition, information collected from the new employee
scheduling and tracking system will let the library answer next year the auditor's
questions of whether existing staff could be redeployed to provide more open hours of operations
altogether and if overtime can be reduced or eliminated.

Some
of the audit's recommendations relate to the upcoming bond measure N.
At the auditor's request, the library determined that the new library at
Mitchell Park will require one to three new staff positions, although
automation and radio tagging of items might reduce that. If the measure fails, the auditor
suggested that the library receive additional funds to handle minor repairs
and routine replacement of furniture and shelving, which the library says will require $24,000 in 2009-10.

On November 4, Palo Alto voters will decide the fate of library bond measure
N, a $76 million effort to replace one library and update two others.
Here's the project in a nutshell:

Downtown Library

Main Library

Mitchell Park Library and
Community Center

Square Footage

No change

Increases to
29,647 sq. ft.

Increases to
51,255 sq. ft.

Collection
Size

No change

Decreases slightly

Increases to 150,000

Patron Seats

No change

No change

Increases to 150

Meeting Areas

New room for
80

New room for
100 and 4 group study rooms

Large multi-purpose room,
program room for 60, 3 group study rooms, 4 classrooms, computer room,
and game room

Public
Computers (excluding laptops)

No change

No change

Increases to 40

Parking

No change

Increases to 88 spaces

Increases to 138 spaces

Possible Completion
Date

2010

2014

2012

Cost

$4 million

$18 million

$50 million

Bond Tax Impact

$200.42
annually for the average single family residence ($28.74 per $100,000 of
assessed value)

Other Costs

$750,000 to $1.1 million
annually in higher operating expenses;about $4.3 million
one-time for furniture,
fixtures, equipment

Artist's view of the proposed combined Mitchell ParkLibrary and Community
Center

We thank our readers for submitting some questions about the
proposal. One asks, "What is the main motivation for the Bond issue?"
The main motivation is to replace the Mitchell Park Library and Community
Center by a combined facility about two-and-a-half times larger. This accounts for 2/3 of the bond funds.

Another question was whether the approximately $976 per square foot for completing the
design on and constructing the new Mitchell Park Library and Community Center is
reasonable, given that local residences costs much less to construct? The
answer is that it's best to compare Measure N against other local library
projects, which have similar design and construction requirements. For
example, a 2007 ballot measure to build a new 116,000 square foot Sunnyvale
Library projected costs under $930 per square foot. Since the Mitchell
Park building, if approved, will start a year or more later and be less than
half the size, Palo Alto's higher price is partly explained by inflation and
fewer economies of scale. Inflation is also a factor for why Palo Alto's cost
is higher than the $772 per square foot for full design and construction of the
53,000 square foot Seven Trees Library and Community Center in San Jose, which
broke ground this year.

This notice comes to you from the non-profit organization
Friends of the Palo Alto Library. No trees were felled in the making of
this e-mail. While the Better Business Bureau recommends that no more
than 35% of a charitable organization's expenses be for management and
fundraising expenses, ours were under 1% for our 2006-2007 fiscal year. In other words,
over 99% of the
money we raised went to help Palo Alto Library users. Visit our web
site. Become a member
by joining online.

Be sure to receive your own free copy of this e-mail notice so that you'll know
about all special upcoming books sales. To sign up, just e-mail
us. We carefully protect the privacy of your e-mail address. We
will not share your e-mail address with any other organization and we will not
use it for any purpose other than to send you these notices. If you do not
wish to receive these e-mail notices in the future, please
reply with the words "Remove Me" in the subject line.